Cyanide
Cyanide and Happiness is a webcomic of black humor and satire, hosted on Explosm.net and writte n by Kris Wilson, Rob DenBleyker, Matt Melvin and Dave McElfatrick, with occasional contributions from readers. It was founded on December 9, 2004 and has received comics almost daily since January 26, 2005. It appears frequently on social networking sites (such as Facebook and MySpace), web forums and blogs, since it allows and encourages openly to fans of hot-link images, a behavior that many disapprove of as "leeches". The authors of the comic attribute the success of the comic strip by its often controversial nature. The site has had more than one million visitors per day (as of November 20, 2006) and ranks 2777th among the most viewed websites and 1338th in the US. only, according to Alexa.com, the creators have also made comics and television ads for Orange U.K., shown in The Sun newspaper. You can currently find episodes in the Xbox One store Explosm Cyanide and Happiness began as a small comic book series drawn by Kris Wilson at the age of 16. One day, at home after suffering from tonsillitis, Kris entertained herself in drawing comics by hand, and later on passing them to them using her computer. Kris created his own website called Comicazi, which allowed him to show his comic strips to other people. Kris shared her comics with the Sticksuicide.com forum. Sticksuicide's webmasters (Matt Melvin, Rob DenBleyker and Dave McElfatrick) gave up StickSuicide and started Explosm.net, a new site less focused on Flash Stick Death animation and more about art in general. They saw the potential in Kris's comics, so he invited him to continue the daily comedy with his help, Explosm is currently directed by Matt, Rob, Dave and Kris. The entire Explosm team now makes comics on a regular basis. Most are based on Kris's style, although there are occasional departures that way. The current name "Cyanide and Happiness" comes from a comic strip in which a character has a sale of cotton candy made of cyanide and happiness. The other character responds: "Happiness? Rays! I'll buy four." In the past, Explosm has stood out in Guest Weeks, where readers sent their work to administrators and the best comics were featured in daily publications every week. In a post on the news site on October 14, 2007, Rob announced that there was a project underway to translate each comic into the archive into several languages. Based on the answer, in a later post, Rob said the response was "phenomenal", with 1,300 responses that were offered to translate into more than 20 different languages. Style The style of Cyanide and Happiness is best described as dark and cynical, often offensive and irreverent in a big way. Common themes of humor include disability, rape, racism, cancer, murder, suicide, necrophilia, pedophilia, sexual deviance, sexually transmitted diseases, self-mutilation, nihilism, and violence. it always has a definitive ending phrase in each band, or it can have several panels of "uncomfortable silence" from (or instead of) the ending phrase, with characters simply looking at each other. There are few recurring characters and virtually no characterization, with characters that often act irrationally or meaningless. The lack of characterization is supported by the primitive drawing style. The characters rarely have names and are usually only distinguished by the colors of their shirts. This, naturally, is opposed to more characters humor. Male characters almost never have hair, which became a joke in itself. The female characters are distinguished by their long hair and the size of the chest, often used to perform comedy. The comic strip also features many references to pop culture such as Nike and Star Wars and celebrities or celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan, George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Steven Tyler, Metallica, The Beatles, Queen, Chad Kroeger from Nickelback, and Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day. Jesus also makes numerous appearances, often with calambures that contain religious comics. The comic, like the animations on YouTube, are usually designed for an exclusively adult and adolescent audience. The four artists also break the fourth wall from time to time, using the territory of a comic panel, as part of the cartoon itself, allowing the characters to interact with them in some way or another. Ecuense make use of metafiction (or breaking the fourth wall), with characters that recognize their condition as cartoons in a webcomic and discuss what is expected of them as a consequence. On at least seven occasions, Cyanide and Happiness has used animation, although it is generally a static comic.